From the Design of British Honduras, 1969

In January, 1969, I moved to British Honduras (now Belize) to renew my six-month residency status in Mexico. I arrived at the border with less than $50 in my pocket. The border officials didn’t want to let me in the country. I told him that money was coming from Canada; I thought I would need to stay in Belize for a month, but I eventually needed to stay about three months due to the difficulties of transferring money from Canada to Belize. The border officials restricted my travels to Belize City itself (which suited me fine), and told me which ‘hotel’ to stay at (a lovely old rather dilapidated mansion with screened veranda across the front aon the three floors. While I waited for the money to arrive at the local Barclay’s Bank, I spent as little as possible on rent, food and a few other items. I lived on excellent rice and beans in local eateries, bunches of small red bananas and a, round, sweet, molasses dark rye bread. I inspected the bananas carefully, having met a large rather ugly, banana spider among them.

While in British Honduras, I purchased an old-fashioned, heavy, hard-cover note- book with 12 ½ x 8-inch lined pages to fill with sketches and keep my ideas for drawings and paintings. I don’t know why I had not used sketchbooks in high-school art school, they are very convenient. I joined the city library and borrowed a big anthology of all the complete writings of Gertrude Stein. I spent a lot of time on the city’s pier at which large, wide and shallow sailboats dumped and sold their cargos of bananas, coconuts and other crops.

As I sketched around Belize City, I noticed the colourful geometric and random organic patterns of ersatz leather patchwork decorating women’s shopping bags, shoulder bags and purses. Out of my sketches and doodles, I began to organize a project of twenty pen and ink and colour drawings, that would title, “From the Design of British Honduras.”

The twenty drawings are on some kind of 12 x 10-inch cartridge paper. The drawings themselves are 6 x 6 inches square. The titles are written in pen on two lines about 1 5/8 inches below the drawings.

Originally, I conceived of this series of drawings being bright colours outlined by black line. However. Perhaps I had discovered the fine-line etchings of Saul Lewitt by the time I began the actual drawings because thy became pen-and-India-ink drawings.  Besides, I had no gouache paint with me. I was also probably influenced by minimalist theory in the way I  titled the drawings.

The Series, From the Design of British Honduras, has been exhibited only once, in a solo exhibition at the Etobicoke Public Library and Gallery in Etobicoke, Ontario, in 1971. Like, several of my earlier projects, this series is not to be broken up.